Multi-document applications are applications in which multiple documents may be opened at the same time, with one of the documents being active and the other documents being inactive. When a document is active, the document may be viewed in the main viewing area of the application. If the application enables editing of the document, the active document may also be edited. When a document is inactive, on the other hand, the document is not viewed in the main viewing area of the application. Instead, the inactive document is represented by a tab. In order to deactivate the current document, and activate another document, the tab corresponding to the particular document is selected. As documents are opened, new tabs are created. Often, the tabs are presented in a particular order.
As an example, web browsers can have multiple open multiple documents in the form of web pages. Each web page has a corresponding tab along the upper portion of the web browser interface. To switch from one open web page to another, the user selects the tab associated with the web page the user would like to see. The web browser responds to the selection by displaying the selected web page in the main viewing area of the web browser. As another example, some document editing programs, such as Visual Studio, use tabs, which may be selected to control which document is viewable and editable in the main viewing area of the document editing program.